About two weeks ago, Super 7’s Conan the Barbarian action figure arrived after a long wait. I ordered it in March of 2019, about one year before the coronavirus shut the country down. A number of production issues delayed his delivery, but Super 7 communicated with customers to keep everyone updated.
The short take? It’s a great piece. But first, a little background.
When I was a kid, and pretty young, too, I saw a Mego Conan on a peg at a store in nearby Deptford, NJ, and asked my parents if I could have it. After some negotiation, I ended up choosing a Jaws tabletop game, which was a fun kind of sudden-death game that the whole family could play. But the Conan always stuck in my mind. I had great memories of other Mego figures: Thor, Falcon, Batman and Robin, Iron Man, and Superman, to name a few. But I never saw that Conan again during my childhood.
Unlike many other Marvel characters, there was never to be another iteration of Conan[1]. Mego Superman and Batman gave way to the awesome Super Powers collection. Mattel introduced the Secret Wars collection around the same time. Both lines introduced interesting characters beyond the usual suspects.
But Conan? No one was making Conan figures. The Mego figure stood alone in the recesses of my mind.
Fast forward a couple of decades: I did finally treat myself to a Conan figure: a Toy Biz figure from a two-pack we happened upon at a local toy show. (My kids got bit hard by the love of plastic at an early age, which is no surprise–I haven’t always said yes when they asked to buy a toy, but I surely gave many more nods than shakes. We discovered toy shows, and I always saved whatever money I had for the boys, the only exceptions being this Conan and a punisher figure, before the Hasbro reboot of marvel legends.) And there was Vikor, too, the Viking from the North from the He-Man line, who was a thinly disguised Conan, complete with chains and everything.
When the Super 7 announcement came out, I didn’t have to think hard on whether or not to order the figure.
And in a moment of synchronicity (synchromicity), I found a collection of Conan stories for the Kindle. For a mere 99 cents.
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There was a Hasbro line of figures that appeared while I was in high school, with a pull-cord in the back of the figure that seemed antiquated even at the time. I’m not counting them just because. 10-year-old He-Man figures were done better. ↩